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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/dungeons-and-dragons-elon-musk/684828/
In This Thread, 2D3D Wonders Why Race Concern Shit In Pop Culture Still Matters
So, Elon Musk apparently had a spergout over WOTC because WOTC apparently did a faerun land acknowledgment and apologized for racially essentializing... well, anything (or everything, I can't tell).
Per the article,
And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC. Perhaps he should keep away from napkins and lawyers for a few weeks, but WOTC staff and progressives have more to lose from a Musk takeover than Musks does if he accidentally commits to the sale.
My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
I trust this forum understands the broad strokes enough to make a culture war summary unnecessary. Anything white nerds love must have more women and minorities and it must explicitly come at the expense of the white nerd favourites. Duke out details in the comments if necessary, the battle itself isn't the point.
The progressives won the previous round already. They got the victory lap of defeating racial essentialism by incorporating noble blacks, I mean orcs, in the rulebook a few years back. Vice, Kotaku, Polygon spammed articles about how this proves the rejection of white supremacy by the powers that be. Hooray for the Resistance, we are now the New Republic. Did I mix my factions? It doesn't matter, and apparently neither did the battle. Because WOTC still saw fit to dig up ancient corpses and put them on trial for heresy.
Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore. The volume of pop media culture wars has deflated in the face of victory, and perhaps Sydney Sweeney deadeyeing a millennial journo hoping for self abasement to atone for even being proximate to white advocacy is emblematic of how irrelevant this public opinion war is. You can, in fact, yeschad someone trying to make you feel guilty for not grovelling for zillenial approval.
But what exactly is the battlefield now? Racial/sexual/gender/whateverfuck representation? Moral ambiguity of 'bad' people unless the bad guy is generational trauma/white supremacy? Sinecures for adherents via "narrative consultancy"? Is the objective to win a battle or just to make noise.
Theres a destructive incentive structure here that I can't parse out fully. The unwoke are perfectly happy to sit back and be gradually edged out, as seen from the ready faggification of media starting with Will and Grace and reaching a high point (maybe) in Bridgerton where intraracial relationships are the enemy (maybe, I don't watch Shondaland slop). Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.
Back to topic. The unwoke are silent dragged along consumers, the woke think they can accelerate the slide or celebrate the slide, suddenly reactionaries Notice and generate backlash, and the woke get smacked in. Retreating in confusion, they conclude that the issue is the message not being made clear enough, and the message is doubled down despite vocal opposition.
Rinse and repeat, but always back into defeat. Social justice went fucking nuts in 2016 because Trump descended from his golden staircase to snatch victory from Hilary Clintons anointed hands, and without the popular vote it seemed that this was merely a technical mistake, one that needed to be message disciplined to ensure the course of history is maintained. Biden won as a moderate but governed as a progressive because his brain turned to soup about a year in and the entire white house was Jill roleplaying Eleanor except without enough balls to lead a relatively competent cabinet, so the progressive staffers wrote every communique and channeled The Groups. Opposition was simply the last gasp of straight white men (and blacks and gays and women and asians and latinos and....)
Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.
I don't really have a concrete point to interrogate in this culture war. My stance that any media featuring a minority front and center being likely to suck because it always means the writers room can't have room to criticize stupidity is enough for me to optimize my consumption because I'm an old moron and nostalgia for old shows from my youth gives me enough tinglies. Yet the strength of reactionary pushback to culture war attempts clearly shows that this is a conflict progressives seem intent on reigniting, and it should be clear that they not only lost the previous rounds but the upcoming battlefield is likely lost. The Dispatch sold a million copies and none of their characters were "body positive" in any way. Contrast that with Concord that literally was dead on arrival with their fat ugly minorities, making me wonder if the skirmishes being reignited are just masochists indulging in a public humiliation/victimization kink.
I would love for D&D to be taken away from WotC and put in the hands of someone who will make some fucking content for it.
Also, this battleground isn't dead, the 5e player-base is fucking ridden with leftists that will eat up queer land acknowledgements. There legitimately is a market for their products. The biggest blow they took lately was the OGL fiasco and how it made all the big-deal podcasters (who have mostly drifted towards being Leftist or Leftist-safe if they weren't there already, to my understanding) try to swap to third-party systems.
This has driven a lot of the growth in the OSR scene... which is interesting because now you can watch in real time as outsiders and entryists accuse the OSR community of being full of fascists, while inside the community it's roughly divided between "I just want Old School orcs" and "We must make it clear that the OSR community is a welcoming and inclusive space."
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I don't play tabletop game any more, but if I did I'd want old orcs and racial bonuses.
I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
What's weird about it? It is as you said: Mind Flayers are an acceptable "evil" race because they are literally an obligate predator of humanoids. Traits that aren't present in real humans are an acceptable factor to base "evilness" upon. Aside from small clusters of the kind of people who hate Frieren for writing demons as evil anyway.
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